IN THIS POSTDOCTORAL FELLOW WORKSHOP, Laurencio Sanguino presents new work developed from his dissertation, "The Origins of Migration between Mexico and the United States, 1905-1945." The focus of his work this year has been Zamora, Michoacán, and its transformation into one of the most important migrant-sending communities in Mexico. Jose Moya (Barnard College) and Madeline Hsu (University of Texas, Austin) will comment on Sanguino's manuscript.

AS A FOLLOW-UP TO HER PARTICIPATION in the panel the night before, Mae M. Ngai will discuss her current work during this Friday workshop. This work examines the labor and social organization of Chinese miners and the racial politics surrounding the “Chinese Question” in California and the Australian colony of Victoria in the 1850s to the 1880s. Although race relations on the goldfields have received relatively little attention, compared to the urban workingmen’s movements of the 1870s and 1880s, the Chinese Question in the early mining years was arguably foundational to anti-Chinese politics in both the U.S. and Australia. Further, anti-Chinese politics has been discussed mostly in terms of discourse and policy, with little empirical understanding of the actual condition of Chinese miners’ work. We thus know much more about what whites thought about Chinese labor than about Chinese labor itself.

One of the consequences of this disparity in the scholarship has been a persistence of the view, in U.S. labor and economic history, that Chinese miners (and labor in general) were indentured, bound by debt peonage, or otherwise enslaved by Chinese “custom.” Ngai examines the genealogy of this view in U.S. historiography and suggests some reasons for its persistence; and, second, shows that it is at odds with the empirical evidence. In fact, Chinese miners worked as independent prospectors, as partnerships, as members of egalitarian cooperatives, in small Chinese companies working on shares, and as waged labor for white-owned companies.

This argument is made both through empirical research in U.S. mining census reports and the accounts of contemporary observers, and through a comparative and transnational approach. This methodology thinks about Chinese gold mining and racial politics in California and Victoria as Anglo-American settler colonies in the Pacific world. It argues that Chinese mining practices and forms of social organization derived from southern China and circulated throughout the Pacific world, adapting to local conditions. Further, in comparing American and Australian variations of anti-Chinese racism, it shows how racial thinking had little to do with the Chinese themselves, other than general ideological (Orientalist) disposition, and was shaped by local political context.

Mai Ngai is Professor of History and Lung Family Professor of Asian American Studies at Columbia University, is a U.S. legal and political historian interested in questions of immigration, citizenship, and nationalism. She is author of the award winning Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America (2004) and The Lucky Ones: One Family and the Extraordinary Invention of Chinese America (2010). Ngai has written on immigration history and policy for the Washington Post, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, the Nation, and the Boston Review. Before becoming a historian she was a labor union organizer and educator in New York City, working for District 65-UAW and the Consortium for Worker Education. She is now working on Yellow and Gold: The Chinese Mining Diaspora, 1848-1908, a study of Chinese gold miners and racial politics in the nineteenth-century California, the Australian colony of Victoria, and the South African Transvaal.

MANY LEGISLATIVE PROPOSALS for comprehensive immigration reform would not only revise immigrant admission categories, intensity enforcement, and offer legal status to unauthorized migrants, but also include a prominent role for temporary worker programs. Some critics of temporary workers view reliance on them as problematic, pointing especially to the underlying assumption that they are truly temporary. On the other side of the debate are those who view temporary workers as an essential to any effective response to unauthorized migration. Drawing on his forthcoming book, Immigration Outside the Law, Motomura explores the roles that temporary workers might play in immigration reform and explain how disagreements about them illuminate key choices in responding to unauthorized migration.

This program has been approved for 1.5 substantive law credit hours for Pennsylvania attorneys. CLE credit may be available in other jurisdictions as well. Attendees seeking CLE credit should bring separate payment in the amount of $25.00 cash or check made payable to "The Trustees of the University of Pennsylvania."

Hiroshi Motomura is the Susan Westerberg Prager Professor of Law at the UCLA Law School. His book, Americans in Waiting: The Lost Story of Immigration and Citizenship in the United States (2007) won the Professional and Scholarly Publishing Award from the Association of American Publishers as the year’s best book in Law and Legal Studies, and was chosen by the U.S. Department of State for its Suggested Reading List for Foreign Service Officers. One of his current projects is a companion volume, Immigration Outside the Law. Motomura is one of the co-founders and current directors of the Rocky Mountain Immigrant Advocacy Network (RMIAN), and he serves on the Board of Directors of the National Immigration Law Center.

PEOPLE OF INDIAN ORIGIN – whether they are Indian-born or U.S.-born – make up well less than one percent of the American population. Despite its small size, this community has been called a “Model Minority” that has been unusually successful in pursuing the “American Dream” through careers in high-skill occupations and entrepreneurship. The talk focuses on four major themes in the immigration literature – selection, assimilation, entrepreneurship, and clustering – to analyze the specific characteristics of this community. Unlike most immigrant groups who enter the country at a disadvantage (relative to non-Hispanic Whites) and converge within a generation or two, the advantages of exceptional positive selection of Indian immigrants at the time of entry appears to be sustained through the next generation.

Devesh Kapur is Associate Professor of Political Science at Penn and Madan Lal Sobti Associate Professor for the Study of Contemporary India. He was appointed Director of the Center for the Advanced Study of India in 2006. Prior to arriving at Penn, Professor Kapur was Associate Professor of Government at the University of Texas at Austin, and before that the Frederick Danziger Associate Professor of Government at Harvard. His research focuses on human capital, national and international public institutions, and the ways in which local-global linkages, especially international migration and international institutions, affect political and economic change in developing countries, especially India.

Kapur’s books include Diaspora, Democracy and Development: The Impact of International Migration from India on India (Princeton University Press, 2010) and, with John McHale, Give Us Your Best and Brightest: The Global Hunt for Talent and Its Impact on the Developing World (2006). He is the recipient of the Joseph R. Levenson Teaching Prize awarded to the best junior faculty, Harvard College, in 2005.

DRAWING FROM ETHNOGRAPHIC RESEARCH conducted in public and private schools in Newark, NJ, Belo Horizonte, Brazil, and Santurce, Puerto Rico, Professor Ramos-Zayas explore the intersection of affect, race, and neoliberalism in the lives of Brazilian and Puerto Rican youth. She examines the ways in which U.S.-born Latinos and Latin American migrants learn race in the predominantly African American context of Newark, NJ and how these forms of racial learning compare to perspectives on race in countries of origin or ancestry. The focus of Ramos-Zayas’ work is on how affect, the organization of feelings and sentiments, intersects with the everyday evaluations of racial difference and the ongoing process of “racial learning,” particularly among Latin American migrants and US-born Latinos. Ultimately, the goal is to understand the impact of capital on young people’s intimate experience of the material environment, and the way in which “race” is perceived, learned, and affectively understood under the intensifying regime of neoliberalism.

“Through quotidian observations, these young US-born Latinos and Latin American migrants assessed the interactive styles of African American women . . . There was a general sense that the emotional style of African American women was more difficult to commodify because of their presumed inability to hide temperamental outbursts, a quality that would render them unmarriageable and unemployable in most of the service-sector, customer-oriented jobs available to working-class women of color in Newark. . . . Nevertheless, young Latinos and Latin American migrants also acknowledged the importance of acquiring a form of racial knowledge that would enable them to better navigate Newark’s urban landscape. They recognized that African Americans possess that desired form of ‘urban competency,’ and the modernity, hipness, and cosmopolitanism globally associated with Blackness.”– From Street Therapists

Ana Ramos-Zayas is Valentín Lizana y Parragué Chair of Latin American Studies within the Black and Hispanic Studies Department (BHS) at Baruch College, CUNY. She is currently working on the intersection of parenting practices, privilege, and affect in two wealthy Latin American/Caribbean neighborhoods: Ipanema (Rio de Janeiro, Brazil) and El Condado (San Juan, Puerto Rico). Up until now, her scholarship has centered on the intersections of race, space, and citizenship on poor or working-class neighborhoods in the U.S., but she now wants to break the tradition of "protecting" elites from ethnographic scrutiny and has decided to shift her research focus accordingly..

Ramos-Zayas has written three books including Street Therapists: Race, Affect and Neoliberal Personhood in Latino Newark (2012); National Performances: Class, Race and Space in Puerto Rican Chicago and Latino Crossings: Mexicans, Puerto Ricans and the Politics of Race and Citizenship (co-authored); and Latino Crossings: Mexicans, Puerto Ricans and the Politics of Race and Citizenship.

IMMIGRANTS ARE AN IMPORTANT AND GROWING SOURCE OF DEMAND that has bolstered housing markets in recent decades, Professor Myers argues, as housing demand has been more stable among foreign-born than native-born households. And as the housing market continues its recovery, it is important to understand the demographic trends which are likely to affect housing demand in the years ahead. In presenting our best understanding of these trends projected to 2020, Myers will draw on his recent report, Immigrant Contributions to Housing Demand in the United States, prepared with John Pitkin and sponsored by the Mortgage Bankers Association’s Research Institute for Housing America (RIHA), as well as related work.

Rooted in the demographic approach to housing that calculates demand as occupied units, projections are developed that build on observed regularities of temporal structure. Aging leads to predictable rates of selling or outmoding, and immigrants supply a growing share of the replacements among both owners and renters in the housing market.

"Foreign-born ownership demand comprised the majority of all growth in homeownership in the established gateway states of California and New York. From 2000 to 2010 immigrants accounted for 82.2 percent and 65.1 percent, respectively, of the growth in homeowners in those states. In that decade immigrants also accounted for the major share of net growth in owner households in Illinois, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, Ohio and Michigan. . . . Foreign-born homeownership demand rose most dramatically in the newer destination states. For example, in Georgia and North Carolina, immigrants accounted for 34.1 percent and 24.8 percent, respectively, of the growth of homeowners from 2000 to 2010. These shares are nearly triple immigrants’ shares of homeowner growth of the 1990s in those states, 12.8 percent and 8.8 percent, respectively."– From Immigrant Contribution to Housing Demand

Dowell Myers is Professor of Policy, Planning and Demography in the Sol Price School of Public Policy at the University of Southern California and Director of USC’s Population Dynamics Research Group. He is a demographer and urban planner who integrates quantitative evidence with interpretations of problems and policy solutions. His research emphasizes the linkage of demographic data (census, surveys, and projections) to future trends in housing, workforce, education, taxpaying, voting, and immigration. He has been an advisor to the Bureau of the Census and authored the most widely referenced work on census analysis, Analysis with Local Census Data: Portraits of Change (Academic Press, 1992). His demographic work has included substantial emphasis on immigration, and his 2007 book, Immigrants and Boomers: Forging a New Social Contract for the Future of America, has been widely recognized.

Recent research projects have focused on public narratives about immigration, aging, and taxation; projections of generational change in the U.S., California, and Los Angeles; and the upward mobility of immigrants the longer they reside in the U.S. In all of his work, Myers seeks to create greater public understanding about pressing issues that affect our common future. He has been an academic fellow of the Urban Land Institute and a member of the Governing Board of the Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning. He is also one of two recipients of the Haynes Award for Research Impact.

IN THIS KICKOFF EVENT FOR a year in which we will examine the many dimensions of immigration policy, and in conjunction with the National Museum of Jewish American History, Penn SSPF has brought together important perspectives on the past and future of immigration in this distinguished panel. It ultimately explores whether, in efforts to maintain America's longstanding status as a nation of immigrants, the emphasis should be on the economic benefit for the U.S. or social justice for those who seek to live here.

Mae M. Ngai, Professor of History and Lung Family Professor of Asian American Studies at Columbia University, is a U.S. legal and political historian interested in questions of immigration, citizenship, and nationalism. She is author of the award winning Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America (2004) and The Lucky Ones: One Family and the Extraordinary Invention of Chinese America (2010). Ngai has written on immigration history and policy for the Washington Post, The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Nation, and the Boston Review. Before becoming a historian she was a labor union organizer and educator in New York City, working for District 65-UAW and the Consortium for Worker Education. She is now working on Yellow and Gold: The Chinese Mining Diaspora, 1848-1908, a study of Chinese gold miners and racial politics in the nineteenth-century California, the Australian colony of Victoria, and the South African Transvaal.

Tamar Jacoby is president and CEO of ImmigrationWorks USA, a national federation of small business owners working to advance better immigration law. She is a nationally known journalist and author. Her articles have appeared in TheNew York Times, The Wall Street Journal,the Washington Post, The Weekly Standard and Foreign Affairs, among other publications, and she is a regular guest on national television and radio. She is author of Someone Else’s House: America’s Unfinished Struggle for Integration, and editor of Reinventing the Melting Pot: The New Immigrants and What It Means To Be American, a collection of essays about immigrant integration.

From 1989 to 2007, she was a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. Before that, she was a senior writer and justice editor for Newsweek. From 1981 to 1987, she was the deputy editor of The New York Times op-ed page.

Born and raised in Puerto Rico, Rodriguez earned a bachelor’s degree in business administration from Boston University and a master’s degree in city and regional planning from the University of Pennsylvania. Before joining the Mayor's Office, Rodriguez managed a more than $200 million portfolio as Vice President of Financial Services with the Philadelphia Industrial Development Corporation, and served as deputy vice president at Asociación de Puertorriqueños en Marcha (APM) where she oversaw the nonprofit organization’s human service programs and directed its sustainable communities initiative.

Joseph Berger (Moderator) has been a reporter, editor, and columnist for the New York Times since 1984. He was a religion correspondent from 1985 to 1987, covering the Pope's trip to ten American cities, and national education correspondent from 1987 to 1990, a period when American school curricula were under attack as too European-focused. From 1990 until 1993, he covered New York City's schools and colleges, when there were bitter controversies over condom distribution and AIDS instruction. He was the recipient of the 1993 Education Writers Association award for exposing abuses in bilingual education. In September 1999, he was appointed deputy education editor, and regularly writes a column on education. Prior to joining the Times, Mr. Berger worked as Newsday's religion writer, where he three times won the Supple Award given by the Religion Newswriters Association, its highest honor. Mr. Berger also worked at The New York Post, covering such assignments as the 1973 Middle East War and Watergate. From 1967 to 1971, he was an English teacher at a Bronx junior high school.

Berger is the author of several books, including Displaced Persons: Growing Up American After the Holocaust (2001), a memoir about his family's experience as refugees in New York in the 1950s and 1960s. The book was chosen as a notable book of the year byThe New York Times. His most recent book is The World in a City: Traveling the Globe through the Neighborhoods of the New New York (2007).

Berger was born in Russia in 1945, spent the postwar years in displaced persons camps in Germany and, after immigrating to the U.S., grew up in Manhattan and the Bronx. He is a graduate of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, City College, and the Bronx High School of Science.